The line-up is formidable: Will Hutton, the Observer, the BBC, Lord Puttnam, the Guardian, plus (as of last week) the Financial Timesand Claire Enders, one of the most influential media consultants. They know what they don't like. They know what should be done so clearly it seems almost ridiculous to ask a countervailing question. And yet, would Rupert Murdoch swallowing all of BSkyB be such an appalling thing?

There is one walloping reason for siding with Will, Claire et al. That Murdoch's too big, too bullying, too voracious. Yes, yes, as Vince Cable might say at the end of a speech about murky capitalism, but what's the beef this time around? Why should the government block a deal that probably doesn't infringe any existing rules? Because, it's said, an even stronger, even less fettered News Corp could bolster Wapping and its websites by using Sky subscriptions as paywall fodder; because – as TV and internet grow ever more intertwined – Murdoch's huge television dominance could wipe out less favoured competitors on the net and in print, as well as clobbering the BBC.

But wait ... The idea of such a subscription trade-off was first floated in this column last 31 January (long before Ms Enders started writing agitated letters to the secretary of state). It picked up on the fact that Optimum Cable, owners of Newsday, had sold only 35 paywall subscriptions – and moved things on a bit, because Optimum had handed all its 1.5 million cable customers a wall pass, too. So here was a notion for the dirty old Digger to try. Give him your credit card details and he'll clean up with a grin.

Perhaps he still will. Perhaps, as the News of the World joins the Times and Sunday Times behind Wapping's wall, the Sky sub card will be played at last.

But it hasn't been played yet. The only developments in Wapping this year, apart from paywalls and a blanket of silence, have been pushing the Times to £1 (with concomitant circulation slithering) and the Sunday Times to £2.20. The price war is over.

Murdoch's two quality titles – with losses of over £87m in the past 12 months – aren't being grimly defended any longer. Will Lewis and his ex-Telegraph team are toiling quietly away at staff integration, and there have been job losses. It's sink-or-swim time.

Nor are their net audiences – running far behind the Guardian and Telegraph even before paywalls went up – being much tended either. They're out of the game, in their own secret garden. Would a quick infusion of Sky subscriptions put them back in it?

There are two concerns that don't fit here. One is a matter of vision.

Some gurus see paywalls as the enemy of net development. Not charging is a matter of principle. So is keeping lawmakers away from the action. There's a "failure of the imagination" among "legacy players", Jeff Jarvis says in an International Press Institute survey. "[They are] making themselves vulnerable to new and efficient competition by ... resisting inevitable change and hiding behind the skirts of government." If he's right, Murdoch is wrong to tinker with futile paywalls – and his critics are wrong to go running to Cable.

And if pragmatism matters more, there are plenty of narrower points for Cable to consider. Should TV cash subsidise print, or vice versa? Can specific blocks on Murdoch ambition – say, by making him sell the Times and the Sunday Times so they have no websites to nurture unfairly – do the job? But isn't getting rid of them exactly what the News Corp board is gagging to do once the old boy retires?

Save a BBC under attack from a monstrous Sky? The trouble there is that "free" news sites subsidised by TV subscriptions (aka licence fees) is precisely what the newspapers are complaining about.

In short, it isn't easy to keep this oddly disparate coalition of naysayers happy all of the time. Nor is it simple, in a digital arena where net giants blossom almost overnight and erstwhile giants like MySpace shrivel away, to set a rigid legislative context that fits "legacy" players into a free-flowing new world where the co-founder of Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg, with his £4.4bn fortune) has rocketed to 35th on the Forbes magazine rich list, leaving R Murdoch at 38.